Tom Griffin, 14 September, 2007

Blocking the back-channels from Ireland to the Middle East

Martin McGuiness

Godson on Trimble

A little-noticed aspect of the story was the apparent corroboration provided by Dean Godson, who is best known in Ireland for a well-regarded biography of David Trimble and for his scepticism about power-sharing with republicans.

In an obituary for Fr Denis Faul, a prominent Irish priest and human rights activist, Godson wrote that Faul “would have been unsurprised by allegations that Martin McGuinness was a British agent: he had claimed as much to me more than five years ago.”

12 September 2007

So the PR industry is gearing up for a scrap. Those masters of the dark arts will be compiling a whole host of tricks to try to hoodwink the UK Parliament’s Public Administration Committee that is currently looking into the lobbying industry.

Outsiders argue that the inquiry, which is the first Parliamentary investigation on lobbying since 1991, is long overdue. Since then, lobbying has been at the centre of sleaze and too many political scandals to mention.

But the fight back has begun. Key PR insiders are warning about how the industry needs to pull together to “salvage our reputation”. Writing in PR Week , Peter Bingle from Bell Pottinger, says that “there is no point rehearsing in public the view that we welcome the inquiry. We don’t. I have yet to meet a member of the industry who does.”

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, 10 September 2007

Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq by Dahr Jamail, Haymarket Books, pp 240, $20 

Charity, vertical, humiliates. Solidarity, horizontal, helps. [1]

In 1937 George Steer’s report on Guernica in the Times (London) turned what would have otherwise been a footnote in history into a metaphor for naked aggression against a defenceless civilian population.

While Guernica was not the worst of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis assisting Franco’s Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, the vivid account of the savagery conjured up in Steer’s descriptive reportage brought home for many horrors of a conflict hitherto deemed distant and insular.

A comparable role was played by Seymour Hersh in 1969 exposing the massacre and subsequent cover up at My Lai, turning public opinion at home decisively against the war. In 2004, an account of a similar tragedy, albeit on a much larger scale, was dispatched to the Inter Press Service from the ruins of Fallujah by Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist of exceptional courage, except no publication in the mainstream picked up the story as nationalist (or perhaps commercial) imperatives trumped journalistic responsibilities.

The news however percolated in the farther reaches of cyberspace for a year; meanwhile several other Fallujah-scale catastrophes were inflicted on the people of Iraq with a similar media reaction. Only when a documentary on the Italian RAI TV corroborated the reports of the use of chemical weapons with footage and soldiers’ testimony, could the story no longer be suppressed and newspapers in Britain finally had to publish it.  

Fallujah is but one in the stream of episodes recounted in Dahr Jamail’s exceptional new book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq. Had these reports been published in a timely fashion a very different reaction could have been expected possibly generating a public outcry.

David Morrison, 10 September 2007

Duty compelled me to skim through Book Three of Alastair Campbell’s diary extracts in case he had failed to delete something incriminating about our military intervention in Iraq.  There is, unfortunately, very little.  Here is the little I found.

On "Regime Change", broadly speaking, the diary extracts back up the thesis established by the leaked official documents from March 2002 that, by then, Blair had taken the decision to give the US military assistance to change the regime in Iraq (see my pamphlet Iraq: How regime change was dressed up as disarmament).

Remember that one of the leaked documents was a memo, dated 14 March 2002, to Blair from his then Foreign Policy adviser, Sir David Manning.  In it, Manning reported on a conversation with Condoleezza Rice, who was Bush’s National Security adviser at the time, in which he told her that Blair “would not budge in [his] support for regime change”.

 Andy Rowell, 10 September 2007

Last week the British armed forces left Basra Palace, their last base in the Southern Iraqi city, and moved to an airbase outside the city.

Their withdrawal will be followed by the official handover of Basra province sometime in the next few months. Once that is complete, the British will finally leave Iraq.

The British withdrawal has led to a classic propaganda  battle over how effective the British were in their four years of occupation.

On the one side, the coalition is arguing that the British have achieved their military objective in Southern Iraq and are leaving victorious. On the other side are countless critics of the war and Iraqis who are saying that the British have been roundly defeated.

For example, last month the radical cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr , who sees the American and British as occupiers, claimed that the British Army had been defeated and had been left with no option but to retreat from Iraq.

Part I. Covert action in Britain from the Cold War to the War on Terror

By Tom Griffin, 4 September 2007 

Is Gordon Brown really “leading the way in counter-terrorist thinking”? That is what the Guardian claimed last month, when it revealed that Prime Minister was looking to the Cold War as a precedent for the ideological struggle with Islamic terrorism.

“In this he has recently been inspired by a 1999 book on the CIA and the cultural cold war, Who Paid the Piper? by the British journalist Frances Stonor Saunders,” Matthew D’Ancona reported. “He was particularly intrigued by the CIA's management of the Boston Symphony Orchestra as ‘the juggernaut of American culture’. Brown cites the success of the anti-communist Congress for Cultural Freedom in harnessing the intellectual firepower of a generation of authors and artists, and funding journals such as Encounter, Transition and Partisan Review.”

It is not obvious from D’Ancona’s laudatory prose, but Brown’s big idea is far from original. If anyone deserves credit for ‘leading the way’ it is surely journalist Dean Godson.

Nicholas Jones, 2 September 2007

(paper to Communication and Conflict Conference , University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. 7 September 2007)

If ever a serial offender was on probation it has to be the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He promised so much in preparing for office. He gave repeated undertakings that the Labour government which he led would end its reliance on spin and turn away from the dark arts of manipulating the news media. Yet, almost three months into his Premiership, Brown has still to show any real sign of delivering on a badly-needed programme of reform to restore public trust in what the government says; to reinforce the independence of the civil service; and to help Parliament rebuild its authority.

What happened was that events took over, the focus kept changing, drawing attention away from the abuses which need correcting. Within two days of entering Downing Street, a succession of potential disasters -- a failed terrorist attack, unprecedented summer floods and then an outbreak of foot and mouth disease -- gave the new Prime Minister an opportunity to project himself in a way which no-one had quite predicted. An arch control freak and manipulator was able, quite literally, to reinvent himself. Almost effortlessly, over the space of a few days, he assumed a commanding position and immediately began to dominate the political agenda, giving the impression that he had succeeded in discarding the political baggage of the past.

Paul de Rooij, 22 August 2007

On 20 August 2007, BBC Newsnight reported on the reactions to climate change protests at Heathrow, and it is a good example of this program's unwillingness to address issues in a serious manner or to provide a wider range of opinion.  Instead of addressing the issues raised by the protesters themselves, Newsnight transformed it into one about current attitudes and concerns of individuals about the environment.  Once this "script" was determined, Kirsty Wark, the program presenter, proceeded to shoehorn the discussion into this circumscribed debate.  There are a number of questions and objections about this program in particular, and the BBC Newsnight format in general.

Paul de Rooij, 17 August 2007

Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War by Jean Bricmont, Monthly Review Press, 1-58367-147-1, 176 pp.

Most inhabitants of Western countries are afflicted by nefarious delusions about the nature of their societies and government policy; the public at large is led to believe that their societies are superior, and their governments’ policies are noble and generous. 

The illusions have to do with the dissonance between the fabricated image and the reality of state power, especially when it entails wars waged against third world countries.  Awful wars are waged for crass motives, yet they are sold on the basis that they are driven by benevolent intent.

Promotion of democracy, freedoms, human rights, women’s rights, and even religious tolerance are some of the purported motives for current interventions, subversion or wars.  Since the 1990s, in the lead-up to the wars against former Yugoslavia, the primary justification offered to wage war was that it was necessary to safeguard human rights or to improve the humanitarian conditions of the target population. 

If the blatant hypocrisy wasn’t bad enough, the Left’s delusions regarding the stated humanitarian rationale for wars has had a distinctly deleterious effect on the Left as a movement and the organized opposition to the depredations of their states.  Jean Bricmont’s Humanitarian Imperialism is an extensive analysis of the “humanitarian war” rationale, and how its twisted arguments should be countered and its rationale for war rejected.

One of the defining aspects of the Left of yesteryear was an opposition to imperialism and its consequent wars; Bricmont’s important contribution aims to resurrect the principled opposition to the new imperial wars waged primarily by the United States and Britain.

Marc W. Herold, 16 August 2007 

The “August 2: Airpower Summary” posted on the official website of the United States Air Force (USAF) announced, “An Air Force B-1B Lancer dropped guided bomb unit-31s on enemies hiding in a tree line near Baghran. The bomb drop was reported to have good effects.” [1]

But, on the ground, reality was rather different: Gul Wali, 18, was among the wounded. “Bombs were falling everywhere from the sky into the trees, and I saw pieces of flesh and bone. These were villagers. They were innocent people. They had just come to the mela [outdoor traditional weekly market] to buy food for their families. Instead, they ended up looking for their loved ones among piles of bodies.”

In the absence of normal shops, most communities mount a weekly trade fair, bringing handicrafts, livestock, farm produce and clothing along to barter or sell. The mela was located close to the holy shrine of Ibrahim Shah Baba. Wali’s reference to a line of trees corresponds perfectly with the account given in the US Air Force’s Airpower Summary. The luckier ones ended up in a hospital, as this young 10-year old boy with abdominal shrapnel wounds and whose leg needed to be amputated:

For its part, the U.S. military in Bagram released an official statement proclaiming,

During a sizable meeting of senior Taliban commanders, coalition forces employed precision-guided munitions on their location after ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area. [2]